were “acques,” the word was “Jacques,” and the sentence as a whole read, “Jacques seems to have taken quite a shine to you, and requests permission to write to you.”
She didn’t care who saw her running up the path, racing up the stairs—not her mother or the lodgers who might later say My, it seemed as if the hounds of hell were after you and then lift an eyebrow, waiting for an explanation. Not Cecile, who would ensure that this tidbit of information got passed all over town: I don’t know what was going on, I just know that when M. DuPont came back, she was down at the end of the road, waiting for him with a letter, hailing him as if he were a taxicab. Simone didn’t even care that the letter she had written to Albert was so hastily scrawled her pen tore the paper, and her words were a quick jumble, telegraphic: Glad to hear that you are well. The baby and I are both fine. Tell Jacques that yes, he may write to me. I hope you will write to me, too. I will write you a longer letter soon. And then, because the letter seemed altogether too abrupt: The baby tires me out and I want to make the next post. I embrace you tenderly, Simone.
A month elapsed before the letter from Jacques arrived. Thank you for giving me permission to write to you. I hesitated only because I did not want to cause any difficulty between you and your relations—whether by blood or marriage. It has taken me so long to pen this missive that I fear by now you may have returned to Istanbul. I have been much involved in affairs here at home in Paris—the completion of a manuscript about my sojourn in Madagascar, for which my publisher is quite eager, and, also, if I can speak quite frankly, in difficulties in my household, which, alas, is not a happy one. My wife is pregnant again.
Simone read the letter over and over again: there was no reference to their—to what had transpired between the two of them—but then, again, Simone was quite uncertain how one would refer to—sexual congress—she had no other words save those. She felt a bit like a child trying to follow a discussion at the family dinner table, knowing that the arched eyebrows, the forced coughs, the allusive words were codes she could not decipher. Was this letter endeavoring to create greater intimacy between the two of them? Or was it merely an attempt to, as the saying went, “let her down easy”? She wrote back to him, having gone through numerous drafts, trying to match her tone to his. In one version she wrote, I am sorry to hear that your home life is difficult, but then thought that sounded too remote. In another draft, written late at night, she made explicit reference to their lovemaking, but when she read it over in the morning she was so ashamed she ripped the paper into tiny squares. In the end, her letter contained reports of the local weather and listings of her son’s latest doings, with a scrawled P.S. I am somewhat cowed, writing to a literary man like you, I fear I don’t express myself at all well, I do miss you, and underlined the word “do.”
Over the course of the next months, letters traveled back and forth between Simone and Jacques. Simone remained in her mother’s home, since Luc had determined that the political situation in Turkey was so precarious she ought not to return. He continued to promise to visit her, but circumstances arose, one after the other, preventing this from occurring. If the letters between Simone and Jacques never grew any more intimate, neither did they grow any less so. Simone lived, as she had during her twelfth year, the year after her father’s death, in a world removed from the physical.
The word “purgatory” had eluded the net of definition. She had leafed through a copy of The Divine Comedy illustrated by Gustav Doré and seen the souls in Purgatory, depicted in shades of gray—lead and slate—abject figures, draped in robes that resembled both burial shrouds and the habits of Mohammedan women, bearing boulders as they moved along a rock-strewn path that wended its way above stark cliffs and fog-shrouded crags. She tried to paste her father’s face into the hollows of those cloaks. The ordinary world—the smell of the ocean, her mother’s whistling as she washed the dishes, her sister Elise’s guffaws—was at best an irritant. The world made sense only when it gestured to what lay beyond: the air in the church, thick with incense, the crucifix on the wall above her bed.
Now the path to the gate was the path down which Jacques had walked. The chair in the parlor was the chair in which he had sat. Even her own son was the infant he had lifted into his arms.
A thick letter from Luc arrived by special post containing a ticket for a steamship departing four days hence. Cecile and her mother packed Simone’s trunks with the same roll-up-your-sleeves, get-on-with-it fervor they applied to spring cleaning. They could not wait to rid the house of the squalling child, Simone’s moodiness. As for Simone, she wanted to be freed from her mother’s house, but she dreaded seeing Luc again, could not imagine receiving his caresses. She thought of pheasants being flushed from fields by hounds, taking wing to escape, easy shots against the sky above.
A week later she was in Istanbul. Luc seemed hardly to notice her diffidence, or if he did put it down to the whims of female nature: skittish, like a horse in a new barn. Give the gal a chance to get settled, and all would be fine. He was fascinated by the child, showing not only the expected paternal pride, but curiosity about the child’s mental and physical processes, his rudimentary acquisition of language—“Do you see, he knows his name. Marcel, Marcel,” and the child looked in his direction—“and when I put the block behind my back—Where did it go? Where did it go?” This interest was not to be confused with indulgence: he was upset that Simone had not yet begun toilet training, making her aware of the latest scientific studies which proved, quite incontrovertibly, that the foundations of a disciplined and well-ordered life were laid down by the regular excretory habits established in infancy.
The first night they were together, Luc thought it best not to press himself on her: no doubt she was tired from the journey and required some time to readjust to his presence. He did want to let her know that his—he formed the word reluctantly, even in his own mind—his love for her had not waned, and so when they lay down next to another in bed that night, he clasped her hands tenderly, and covered them with a series of minute kisses. She shocked him by becoming quite forward, initiating the marital act. At its conclusion, as in the past, he rose and washed himself, and then she did the same, even squatting down a bit—the washbasin was behind a screen—and twisting the flannel around her finger, shoving it inside her, doing her best to remove every trace of him.
When she was having sex with Luc, she imagined Jacques’ presence—not that Jacques was moving in and out of her, but that he was watching them couple with a look of amused contempt.
She spent her days reading novels and staring at the blue sea and blue sky. The servants washed and rewashed the floor (they were horrified that their master and mistress wore shoes indoors) and occasionally brought her child to her.
One day, standing at the balustrade staring at the horizon, she felt a sharp queasiness and realized she was pregnant. She would be sent back to France for her parturition.
For the first time since her return to Istanbul, she smiled a smile that was not forced.
Lumbering, flat-footed, great with child, Simone returned to Juan-les-Pins.
A letter from Jacques, penned many months before, waited for her. (She had written before she left telling him she was returning to Istanbul, that their correspondence must, at least for a while, cease.)
She sat down at the table in her room, without even removing her coat, and wrote to him. She wrote of the blue of the sea and sky in Istanbul and her disgust at her husband’s body. And that, once again, another creature was within her.
The
